Trial ; 360 panorama
Today I am going to have a practice run on making a 360 virtual tour previous to carrying out the official one which will be done in Naawab Restaurant tomorrow.
After refering to the notes I had taken down in one of our lessons on making a 360 virtual tour, I set up my camera at home in the living room for a practice shoot. As this is purely for experience and practice I am not going to waste time making the images HDR, or set up any exra lighting on this occasion, simply to make it easier and save myself time.
Firstly I worked out how many images would be needed for this shoot, since I'm shooting on a full frame canon 5D mark 2 with a 15mm fisheye lens, I set the rotation unit at 60% which meant that 6 images would be shot not including the zenith (ceiling) or nadir (floor) shots. I now decide where the ideal spot would be to do the shoot from, as this is important that you find the correct possition initialy so as not to waste more time setting the camera up at a later stage.
As the room I am shooting is not very big and it has a coffee table on one side of it, I chose the open space near the window with a door behind me, this looked a suitable spot for this shoot.
I then found the Nodal point by turning the camera facing down onto the tripod.
This wasn't as difficult as I had imagined, and having found the nodal point by finding the center of the tripod in the lens, we do this by sliding the horizontal plate until the camera lens is directly over the little screw fixed in the tripod, we need to now check that the camera is level at all rotations in a 360 turn on the tripod, we do this using a spirit level. Its now time to set the camera to no parallax.
This animation is an example of parallax. As the viewpoint moves side to side, the objects in the distance appear to move more slowly than the objects close to the camera.
To find the No-parallax point we turn the camera now to the portrait position, using two straight lines which are set at a dsitance apart, ( the distance will depend on where you are shooting) for this test I used two light stands and placed them in front of one another in line with the camera, since it has now been set for the nodal point it must not be moved from where it stands.
The two light stands when seen through the viewfinder look parallel, but when the camera is moved from side to side the stands seem to move, as shown in the moving image above.
In order to prevent this we must move the lens forward or backwards until the stands don't move, this is called the no-parallax,once we have set the no-parallax we can start shooting. Here is a link to a video on you tube showing how to find the nodal point and no parallax.
Here are my images taken for my trail 360 taken in the livingroom, before being stitched together it PTGui, they are not hdr as this would have taken me much longer to process and since the aim of the test was simply to make sure that I knew how to use the equipment and also how to put the final images together in PTGui and Pano 2VR.
I did the trial shoot so that I would know exactly what to do and look profesional when doing the real shoot at Nawaab Restaurant tomorrow.
Unfortunately the final 360 can not be posted on my blog, I am in the process of working out how to get round this.
Here is the quick time movie created from my images to make my 360.
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